I had the opportunity to attend the Mobile Web Americas Conference in Orlando, Florida this week. The Mobile Web Market is HUGE and exploding. Now is the time to be ready to deliver content to mobile devices.

Every speaker at the conference began their presentation with a quote similar to:

"There are zillions more mobile units than PCs."

We need to be prepared for this growing user base.

Conference Highlights

Web Standards

Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera, often reminded us of the importance of designing with Web standards, some statements from various times he spoke:

"Standards is the only thing that scales."

"There is only one Web." [Not a mobile web and a computer web]

"The only way to make sure your life is easy is to use Web standards."

Mobile Web Design Best Practices

Matt Womer, Mobile Web Initiative Lead for the W3C, presented one of the most practical presentations and gave away the most useful give away. Following are some of the best practices he presented:

Matt mentioned this information will be available online in-depth.

Context Relevant Content

Context relevant information will become more and more critical. Taking advantage of user demographics to provide information that is relevant to them will be essential. Mobile has the potential to allow very specific context especially as it relates to the Geo Web.

Mobile Search

The panel discussion on mobile search was moderately interesting. Local site search is very valuable on the mobile Web. Navigation elements get in the way of content display on mobile devices. Good site search is the best option for fast access to site content. Search wins over navigation for method of finding things on mobile sites. Search will be the front door. Navigation has too many clicks.

The Weather Channel

A representative from The Weather Channel presented how they are very successful in the mobile market. One of the more interesting presentations. A few points of interest:

• The Weather Channel is privately held
• URL just for the iPhone: www.weather.com/iphone
  • Works well on my e61 too
• Sending a text message to 42278 with your zip code returns a brief weather forecast

iPhone

It's an interesting time to be attending a mobile Web conference because the iPhone is definitely stirring up the discussion. Most of this group seems threatened by the iPhone. For example, Craig Cumberland - a Nokia representative, while discussing GPS and search prodded:

"Can you fire up your GPS on your iPhone?"

Nokia has half a dozen or so phones with GPS capability while the iPhone's location awareness is not very sophisticated.

Unfortunately, there was no representation from Apple to give their perspective. This seems to be a huge oversight. A conference of this title at a time when the iPhone is fueling the mobile Web discussion in every news media should have iPhone representation.

Testing for Mobile

The number of mobile devices out there makes testing highly challenging. There are two reasonable options for comprehensive testing:

1. Use a software emulator like Adobe's Device Central or something similar.
   • Only a simulation, not the real experience.
2. Sign up for a mobile testing service provider that actually has real cell phones in a server-farm/data-warehouse type of environment. Via subscription they allow you to remotely operate the mobile devices and even do things like disconnect the battery to reset the phone.
   • Close to the real experience
   • Who has this kind of time? (For some, it is required by the carrier in-order to be included on their deck)

   Who has this kind of budget?

But for a small operation, is comprehensive testing even feasible? The solution as I see it is standards plus 20 testing?

UCF

The University of Central Florida, sent one of the better and last presentation. They are doing some interesting things with mobile learning and mobile learning games.

Entertainment and Sky-diving Stories

Provided by Peter Shankman. Thanks.

Quick Quotes

Give back to the community - only a community can test enough.

Allow page and element caching. (Improves speed on mobile devices.)

More smart phones are shipping than laptops.

Smart Phone - weakest link in data security.

Dealing with the cell phone carriers is a pain. There has been a lot of talk about the carrier deck.

I know that I'm the only thing separating you from the door.

The Final Call

Overall the conference was a huge disappointment.

I was interested and signed up largely due to Cameron Moll's name being on the speaker list. I've followed his RSS for a while and past experience with his lectures have been highly useful. The conference organizers wasted his talent. It turns out his job was introducing the next PowerPoint presentation in the afternoon breakout session. Now he did a good job, but the task did not require a professional designer, it could have been accomplished by anyone with a watch.

Speaking of time, most of the conference was run without regard for a clock. Presentations usually started late and/or ran over.

There was moderately adequate audio/visual support. The panel discussion did not have microphones for all of the panel and sometimes needed a roving microphone. With the diverse accents present, the lack of excellent audio support made some of the presentations and conversations near impossible to follow. PowerPoint presentations with audio in the middle caused scrambling to plug in audio to the presentation laptop. The batteries in the presentation slide remote died early on the last day. There were no spare batteries or back-up remote.

The was little difference in the conference days and the Mobile Web 101 Workshop day. Both days consisted largely of presentations from companies that provide some sort of mobile content or service. The presentations were very weak in practical knowledge and best practices. Considering that most presentations were filled with commercials for the presenter's products, even at the half-off education rate, the conference was way over priced.

I did learn a little useful information and the conference gave me an opportunity to whittle my incoming RSS feeds down to zero for a few moments and write this post.

Links

http://del.icio.us/tag/mobilewebamericas

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mobilewebamericas/

Three of us tried taking notes together using a shared Google Document, but the sad Internet connection at the Regal Sun Resort could not support it. Here's a link to the unedited raw notes:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcwzn86_93c8rvrf

Definitions

Carrier Deck

The portal type area of carrier controlled links that begins the mobile Web experience on mobile phones. Generally the deck is a roadblock to the full Web.

Standards Plus 20 Testing

A best practice testing procedure. The process involves, first meticulously meeting and validating for the appropriate Web standards for the target distribution devices. Second, physically testing on the 20% of real devices and providers used by the target audience (likely represents 80% of traffic).

GeoWeb

The dream of geographically interacting with the Web. Supposedly, 80% of current Web content can geographically referenced to a location.

Webforms 2

An emerging standard for creating web forms. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/

PPC

Pay Per Click - referring to ad placement

QR Code

Mobile scanned 2-D bar codes.

Technorati Tags: Design Internet Mobile Usability Web Design "Mobile Web Americas" "Mobile Web Conference" "Mobile Web Americas Conference" "Standards Plus 20 Testing"